2011

Four Day Shelf Life

Metroplitian State University of Denver | Department of Art

Exhibition 1 Dates: Nov 18 - Dec 1, 2011

Exhibition 2 Dates: Dec 9 - 15, 2011

The graduating students from the Department of Art at Metropolitan State College of Denver are proud to present Four Day Shelf Life, two collaborative BFA thesis exhibitions. The thesis shows feature artworks produced by twenty-nine of Denver’s up and coming artists in a variety of mediums, such as sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, jewelry & metalsmithing, photography, mixed media, video/digital art, and ceramics.

Altered Nature: Notable Interpretations from South America

Exhibition Dates: September 1 – November 5, 2011

ALTERED NATURE: Notable Interpretations from South America features artwork by eight artists from South America who respond to patterns and rhythms in nature, ranging from plant life to human interaction. The artists reinterpret set norms, in nature and society, by challenging misleading certainties with eight distinctly different approaches:

Reclamation

Exhibition Dates : June 2 – August 13, 2011

Reclamation was an exhibition where the mundane is beautiful, the industrial is refined and function gives over to form. Using cardboard, discarded and splintered pallets, last year’s billboard ads, emptied beer cans and film cartridges – all destined for the wasteland see a rebirth as raw material in art making. Detritus of our consumer culture, once serving a functional purpose have been reclaimed as fodder for new formal narratives.

‌In Other Words

Metropolitian State University of Denver | Department of Art

Exhibition 1: April 22 - 28, 2011

Exhibition 2: Friday, May 6 - 12, 2011

The students graduating with a BFA from the Department of Art at Metropolitan State College of Denver are proud to present In Other Words. The BFA thesis exhibition will feature a collection of artwork from the graduating students in two installments. The artwork is the culmination of the student’s academic careers and will feature a wide mix of media.

‌SIGHT UNSEEN: International Photography by Blind Artists

Exhibition Dates: March 3 – April 9, 2011

Sight Unseen, the first major exhibition of work by the world?s most accomplished blind photographers. The exhibition explores the idea that blind photographers can see in ways that sighted people cannot. Many of us, with sight leading as our dominant sense, use images to build our world. Visual information is practical to our survival and yet it has become pervasive in our world. We respond to visual overload by shuttering and narrowing our perception, a form of self inflicted blindness, so as to rebalance our senses. But for the sight-impaired artists in this exhibition, making a photograph has provided new ways of seeing.

These artists employ diverse strategies in their work. Some use the camera to present their own inner visions. Some capture the outside world unfiltered with a non-retinal photography of chance. And a number of the artists, legally blind but retaining a limited, highly attenuated sight, photograph to capture the outside world and bring it into their realm.

In his novel Blindness, José Saramago writes, "Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are." Beethoven composed music without the ability to hear, blind Milton and Homer conjured the landscapes of the heavens and the underworld, and the artists of Sight Unseen further explore our definitions of blindness and challenge us to reevaluate what it means to see.